The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the rwandan genocide of 1994 153
in the rituals that Europeans would have found difficult to accept: ritual copulation
on the part of the king and his wives, human sacrifice, ritual war, and adornment
of the royal drum with the genitals of slain enemies.
As for the ethnic origin of the rituals, although the central Rwandan monarchy
was dominated by a Tutsi king and many of his closest associates were Tutsi, many
scholars claim that similar rituals were being performed in Hutu polities prior to
the central kingdom’s existence (d’Hertefelt 1971:32). It is probable that the existence
of the state in central Rwanda preceded its becoming a Tutsi-dominated institution.
Therefore the rituals and their attendant symbolism cannot readily and
simply be ascribed to later Tutsi dominance. In addition, although the Rwandan
king was Tutsi, the rituals he enacted had to address the preoccupations of the Hutu
majority, particularly the concern for orderly rainfall and an abundant sorghum
harvest. Moreover, in material terms the king performed a redistributive function,
concentrating wealth and then redisbursing it.
Careful reading of the ritual texts indicates recurrent preoccupation with maintaining
orderly fluid flows and implicitly that of imaana. The term, imaana, although
often translated as “God,” only occasionally referred to a supreme being. More frequently,
imaana was a generalized creative or transformative force, or, as d’Hertefelt
and Coupez have translated the term, a “diffuse fecundating fluid” of celestial
origin. Gaining access to the powers of imaana and keeping the fluids of production,
consumption, and fertility in movement were arguably the most important ritual
functions of the Rwandan king (mwami). The mwami was the ultimate human
guarantor of the fertility of bees (for honey), cattle, women, and land. In times of
drought, famine, epidemic, or epizootic, he could be deposed or called upon to offer
himself (or a close relative) as a sacrificial victim (umutabazi), so that the shedding of
his blood would conjure away collective peril. The king mediated between the sky
and the earth. He was the most important rainmaker for the kingdom. He received
the celestial gift of fertility and passed it downward to his subjects. In some instances
this beneficence was conceptualized as milk, as is expressed in this dynastic poem:
The King is not a man,
O men that he has enriched with his cattle...
He is a man before his designation to the throne...
Ah yes! That is certain:
But the one who becomes King ceases to be a man!
The King, it is he Imaana
And he dominates over humans...
I believe that he is the Imaana who hears our pleas!
The other Imaana, it’s the King who knows him,
As for us, we see only this Defender!...
Here is the sovereign who drinks the milk milked by Imaana,
And we drink that which he in turn milks for us!
(from La poésie dynastique au Rwanda, pp. 53–55, cited by a. kagame [in French] in
La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être, 1956:15 [my translation])